Terada - Looking Away (Selections).pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

38 looking away
and intransigent psychic facts. In the history of these struggles, I want to
suggest, the attitudes that thinkers take toward phenomenality recurrently
reveal attitudes toward diffuse, low-level dissatisfaction. In classical skepticism,
dissatisfaction is what we’re supposed to feel toward appearance: the
principle of akatalepsia, the idea that appearance tells nothing about nonappearance,
is often treated as though it meant that appearance told nothing
worth knowing. But too much dissatisfaction with appearance is also
treated with suspicion, this time by realists, on the reasoning that even
skeptics’ mistrust of appearance overvalues it. People who seem to be expecting
something from phenomenality can expect to be accused of expecting
too much.
Too much what? Interest in phenomenality for its own sake is interpreted,
and resented, as a desire to escape the inescapable. Skepticism toward
appearance is resented on complementary grounds, as indicating the
questioner’s queer craving, “against nature,” for more than experience can
give. Behind discomfort on these topics lies the assumption that dissatisfaction
with natural conditions—or with social relations broad enough to
suggest dissatisfaction with natural ones—should not be uttered or perhaps
even felt. The conflict over appearance and reality is a second-order
social conflict about what conflicts it is sociable to have.
Coleridge ponders the social dimensions of epistemological attitudes, as
we can see in his remark about “wild-weed spectres.” In what turns out to
be a frequent association, Coleridge attributes his enthrallment with spectra
and his fear of spectres to something like but worse than the credulity
of children. It’s childlike to attach “belief of reality” to ghosts; it’s worse
than childlike—it’s incomprehensible—not to believe in ghosts and still be
affected by them. Caring about phenomena he doesn’t believe in divides
him from “most men,” Coleridge notes with both pride and exasperation.
Although caring beyond belief shows off his autonomy, demonstrations of
that autonomy, ironically, diminish Coleridge’s credibility with other people,
or so he thinks. The situation can also be read the other way around,
to imply that Coleridge cares about spectra because he feels alienated from
most men in the first place. The circularity of explanations means more
than either explanation alone, since it suggests the mutually constitutive
relation of interpersonal and perceptual experience. While we accept in
theory and yet often ignore the idea that every least perception is also a so-